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Protecting Intellectual Property

Everyone realises the importance of Intellectual Property, but most ignore the importance of protecting it. Security solutions can help. By Varun Aggarwal

After months of rigorous work, double shifts and sleepless nights, you have successfully crafted an innovative ad campaign that will help your advertising agency get more business. Before you can launch the ad, a similar one is launched by your client’s competitor. You lose the client and take a huge hit to your business. That is the moment when you regret not taking care of your intellectual property. It is better to learn this lesson before getting sideswiped by a huge blow.

In today’s highly competitive world, trade secrets can be your only hope for existence. It takes enormous resources and efforts to develop intellectual property. Since developing innovative ideas takes a lot of effort, companies focus more on the innovation bit and tend to neglect protecting this invaluable asset, without realising that they are leaving their most important asset open for hackers to exploit and sell it to their competitors.

Surendra Singh, Head, South East Asia and India, Websense Inc says, “The biggest hurdle faced by companies is ignorance within the organisation in identifying sensitive information which should not be leaked out. Information leaks may be either intentional or unintentional. According to Gartner, by 2010, 80 to 90 percent of data leaks will be unintentional in nature.” Pertaining to IP, organisations across industry verticals always have certain information which is critical to a company and if that gets leaked it might lead to issues like loss of market share and brand equity. For e.g. leaking of IP details of new molecules developed by a pharmaceutical company to its rival or leaking of a software program’s source code from an IT company can be disastrous.

Yet most of us do not want to be bothered about thinking of ways to protect the same. Protecting your Intellectual Property from malicious people can be a daunting task if proper measures are not adopted.

Patenting your work

Getting your work patented can be a good way to help protect your IP. Many organisations still hesitate from getting their IP patented. In such cases, even if the information is stolen, there is little that you can do about it. Proving that the idea originally belongs to you can take years in Indian courts. Another problem with the patents is that they are extremely expensive. Dinesh Jotwani, Senior IP Counsel (Asia Pacific), Symantec Corporation says, “The total cost of a patent application can be anywhere between $30,000 and $35,000. The patent application has two components. The first part involves drafting the application, which costs anything from $10,000 to $15,000 and the second part involves prosecution of the patent application, which can cost up to $20,000 per application. To keep the application alive we have to pay annuities to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which amounts to $6,000 and is valid for 20 years.” It should carefully be determined whether it is even worth applying for a patent.

Jotwani insists that companies should have a stronger patent management process and should be able to foresee the technologies of tomorrow. There is no point in spending money on technologies that are going to vanish in a couple of years. A patent is valid for 20 years; hence, the technology has to be relevant going forward. Companies also need to keep a watch on the market and look for any infringement that may take place. Companies should have a special licensing team that can actively work on identifying potential revenue or possible infringement by other companies. Further, companies can get a good return of investment (ROI) by ensuring that their architects design products to get the maximum leverage out of the patent portfolio.

Proactive measures

Although 100 percent security is unattainable it does not mean that we should stop locking the doors of our houses. Matt Walmsley,  3Com Product Marketing, Asia Pacific Region says, “No single security measure will ever provide a truly pervasive solution and so it is an accepted industry best practice to architect security solutions using a “defence in depth” approach. Such layering of security measures may include the definition of the organisational security policies, user training, physical access controls, user and device authentication before granting network access, application layer access controls, monitoring and audit trail solutions.”

In order to protect your company’s secrets from hacking attacks, you need a sound Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). IPS delivers high-speed packet analysis to spot malicious flows, cyber threats and security policy violations and automatically takes the appropriate protective measures and controlling actions. “IPS stops threats impacting your organisation’s network infrastructure. A high performance IPS with broad vulnerability coverage is a key component to ensuring that your network is not hacked or abused,” adds Walmsley.

Singh says, “IDS and IPS tools work well to prevent hacking. However the majority of leaks are the work of insiders who either already have access to IP or know the passwords (like secretaries to top officials). IDS/IPS or firewalls will not be able to prevent such breaches.” Apart from having just an IPS, you also need solutions like information leakage prevention.

Keeping secrets under wraps

One of the best ways to prevent your secret information from escaping your office premises is to deploy an information leakage prevention system. These systems monitor your employee e-mail and chat and ensure that classified information is not copied or sent out. This is one area where many companies are investing as they realise the potential of this technology.

Various products can help protect trade secrets and IP data that exist in digital form, during certain points in the data lifecycle. There are emerging technologies that monitor the movement of structured and unstructured data and enforce actions on data based upon custom policies. These products work at the network and desktop level, and can monitor movement, prevent data from being copied from the originating application to external sources and help classify data.

One such solution is Websense’s Content Protection Suite v6 that combines content and context awareness leveraging Web intelligence through integration with the software’s URL database and ThreatSeeker malicious content classification technology, as well as new context-based data recognition capabilities that increase detection accuracy and enable organisations to create and enforce user-specific data sharing policies.  Tools built into messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange permit the system administrator to enforce policies that prevent a message from being copied or printed for that matter. The solutions exist, all that is needed is to deploy them and ensure that the right policies are framed to leverage them.